Abd Rahman

“A man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbour with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he is happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“Being understood takes precedence over being loved. If you’re loved without being understood, then you have to live in fear; the fear that one day your lover will come to understand you and then not love you any more. But if you’re understood first, if your lover knows and accepts who you really are, then it is truly you who is being loved, and you can love and be loved without fear.”
― J.P Tate

“Take all the cultural trappings away and we are all just generic creatures barraged by a continuous stream of sensations, emotions, and events, buffeted by occasional waves of existential dread, until those experiences abruptly end. But in a world infused with meaning, we are so much more than that. Still, it is not enough to be equipped with our scheme of things. We humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we believe in. To this vital striving for self-esteem we now turn. CHAPTER 3 Self-esteem:”
― Sheldon Solomon, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

“Life is all one long hard thing.
He must have the courage to feel alone, to look his own pain in the face, bearing the entire weight of it.”
― Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric